New music
bella.todd
There’s an extraordinary moment, in Peter Strickland’s deeply sensual, desperately funny and feverishly powerful S&M love story, when a camera travels slowly into the darkness between a woman’s thighs. It’s an extraordinary moment in the soundtrack, too. In place of the golden strings and softly hovering choral notes, Brighton Dome suddenly fills with a monochrome electronic pulsing, as if an army of giant moths is flying over with wings of black sheet metal.Your eyes finally flick back to the other half of Cat’s Eyes. Faris Badwan has spent the performance tucked away behind a synth, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly, cathartically filthy jokes instantaneously, he makes an audience unfamiliar with his style take a few minutes to calibrate their response. Once you understand that the Holiday is for real, and everything else tongue (or that’s what it looks like, anyway) in cheek, the evening makes curiously, but compellingly refreshing dramatic sense. The echoes Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Flavia Coelho once told me her parents in the favelas of Rio put an aluminium bucket over her head as the only way to calm her down. It was also a useful echo chamber to practise her singing. Her parents were hairdressers for drag queens. She still comes over an overactive child on stage and is one of the most dynamic live acts you are likely to see: she’s like a Duracell bunny on stage. She performed as part of a trio with a keyboardist and drummer, playing low slung guitar and bashing drums sporadically during her set, but the lean line-up seemed expandable – give her the cash and she would Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The pendulum of Róisín Murphy’s creativity has long swung wildly between massively pop and trickily artsy, right back to her hit-making millennial days in Moloko. She followed these with a wilful dive into the abstract, working with found sound techno maverick Matthew Herbert on her debut solo album. It was an intriguing proposition but one that never proved contagious. She followed it, however, with Overpowered, whose eponymous lead single should have been a massive hit but wasn’t. On that album, she allowed her inner Lady Gaga out for a frolic. The results were contagious, colourful fun. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Remember how in the Eighties, lead-singer solo albums would consist of a few songs left over from the day job played on synthesisers? That’s how Killers’ Brandon Flowers' second solo effort feels. At first. The big difference is, back in the day, extra-curricular efforts by the likes of Freddie Mercury or Mick Jagger would exude a thrown-together air. Flowers’ record, on the other hand, has been polished like a Las Vegas hub cap.The net result, though, is much the same: The Desired Effect sounds like Flowers' main band but with (a fraction) less punch. The blue-collar vignettes are, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It takes a particular combination of talent, guts, perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness for an artist to take the creative decisions that Thea Gilmore has across her approaching 20-year career and get away with it – thankfully, all qualities that the Oxford-born songwriter has in spades. Since the release of her debut album, Burning Dorothy, when she was still a teenager, Gilmore has won admirers ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Joan Baez, re-recorded an entire Bob Dylan album, pioneered fan-supported songwriting and even flirted with the UK Top 40 on her 14th album.If you thought that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bobby Womack: The PreacherCover versions of standards like “Fly me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” were hardly going to make a mark with a hip – or, for that matter, any – audience in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nor was reinterpreting The Beatles’ “And I Love her" and “Something”. Chuck in the adaptations of The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”, Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and Ray Stevens’s trite bubblegum-gospel hit “Everything is Beautiful” which pepper the first five solo albums from Bobby Womack, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Whether you view him with reverence as the Modfather or rather more sneeringly as the King of Dad Rock, there is no doubt that Paul Weller is a bone fide musical icon. Thirty-eight years after the Jam’s debut, In the City, there is still a sense of anticipation for many each time he releases a new album and Saturns Pattern is certainly no disappointment.“White Sky”, a collaboration with Manchester space-cases Amorphous Androgynous kicks things off, and initially comes on in a wash of swirling ambient spaceyness. It soon explodes into a howling blues rock stomper though, with Paul barking “ Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Hot Chip are a band who have, over the years, brought a different personality to the hedonistic house party – one that often seems caught halfway between the kitchen and the designated dancefloor. This, their sixth album, sees them trying to edge their way towards the latter while questioning their place – and relevance – in the wider musical firmament.Things kick off well enough with “Huarache Lights”, a song strong enough even to bear the weight of a hamfisted First Choice sample and hackneyed Daft Punk-esque vocoder and still cross the finishing line smiling. Similarly, the fidgity bounce Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Kate Tempest's long blonde-brown hair flailed as she prowled the stage, red-faced from exertion, adhering not a jot to the media’s tick-boxes for femininity. She is smaller, by far, than her backing band, dressed down in baggy sweatshirt and jeans. Unlikely star material yet she exuded such energized passion and righteous charisma that, by the end, as she encored with a poem that, like so many tonight, seemed to allude to the troubling political developments of last week, she had the audience rapt, completely engaged. “We never saw it coming,” she announced towards the close, “like all the Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
B B King was the greatest blues guitarist of the age. Many contemporary rockers credit him as a formidable inspiration, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton to Bono. But when I met him in 2006, the then 83-year-old musician had a different perspective on his ability. "I don't think it's true," he says with a shrug. "A lot of kids tease me when they see me, they start to bow. I'm not trying to stop them. I think I'm a pretty good musician, I don't think I'm the best, that's all. I just do what I do my way."When I point out that he's often hailed as the second-most gifted guitarist of all time, Read more ...